This week my group finished 3D laser scanning, photographing, and recording video footage of the objects. We also had the added surprise of the James Monroe Museum asking us to include a sixth object, the James Monroe musket. The Director wanted to include the musket because it illustrates a common problem in museums. According to Monroe family lore, James Monroe used the musket for hunting, took it to college at William and Mary, and fought with it in the American Revolution. However, the lack of supporting documents and the fact that the musket is an amalgamation of other muskets makes the story difficult to prove. I think it is a good object to include in the digital collection because it highlights the issues with interpreting poorly documented objects. Posting a 3D scan and photographs online may also eventually lead to viewers offering new information about that musket or muskets of the same time period that could help the museum.
Gordon Diaries Update
The end is upon us. So I met with Mrs. Chase today and put all the files from the scanning onto my external hard drive; it was all over 10gbs! I just need to put the transcripts that I did onto this hard drive and all the scanning and transcriptions will be all in one place. Moving forward, I am met with a challenge that is not directly associated with this website. As my college career comes to an end, it has been quite difficult to dig down deep and find motivation to apply myself to the best of my ability. However, I know that I will be able to push myself to finish out my semester strong.
Gordon Project Update
In the past week the main work our group has been involved in is the inputing of the diaries into the Omeka site. Following the trend of struggle I have had with Omeka this semester everything went along great till there was a glitch.
This week we realized that while we had all been uploading the site we had forgot to officially agree on a standard for the titles of each item. Realizing this we sat down last class and made a decision how to label each item and made sure that each group member was aware of the standard. The only issue was that each of us had to go back and manually edit each item for the small formatting mistakes. In particular I forgot to add a comma after the date and had to manually go back into over 100 entries and add the comma. While tedious I am glad we realized it now and not at the very end of the whole project.
Another issue was that we did not set up the path correctly for connecting images to the site. So half of the images we uploaded had to be uploaded again after we sorted this out. Again an irritating moment. Other then these two hiccups though the uploading process has been going along great. James finished imputing our largest diary and other diaries are close to completion. Other group member have been working on completing our summary page and Gordon page throughout the week and we are working on changing some of the visuals on the site to improve the quality of the site.
Project Update
We have begun making headway on the organization of our website. This week we need to start focusing more on that, and deciding how we will present the information on our website. The good thing is that we have no shortage of information. The tricky thing will be sifting through all the information we have and determining from that, what is important, and how we will organize it. Monday, we are conducing a video walkthrough of the HCC, with managers of each main room talking a bit about the purpose of the rooms and their functions. After this, we should have all the video content we need for our site.
Week #11 JMM Update
While progress on the James Monroe Museum 3D scanning project began slowly, it is now progressing on schedule. Last week my group and I filmed three videos of Jarod Kearney, the curator at the James Monroe Museum talking about three of the objects we have scanned. Additionally, we took still pictures of the objects for internet users to view as well as the 3D scanned images and videos of the objects. The videos have been successfully downloaded to my computer and the next step is to start editing them. This week my group plans to focus on getting more information on the website and to complete all pictures, videos, and 3D scans of the five museum objects.
Museum Update!
For that past couple weeks the James Monroe Museum group has been working diligently to get our project done as efficiently and quick as possible. One of the obstacle that really stood in our was the learning curve that the technologies that we were using presented to us. When we were told that we could use three different 3D scanners and in the end we found out that only one would work the way that we wanted it to. One of the scanners 3D printed the object but didn’t include the colors of the object, while the other scanner wouldn’t work for us because the plugins that we needed weren’t working. In the end the IPad 3D scanner was the one that would best do the work that we wanted it to do. This learning curve caused the group to fall behind for the scanning stage, but ones that issue was resolved, we were able to swiftly catch up and continue on our planned schedule.
Digital Resume – Update
When originally doing the assignment to create a digital resume, I ran into a problem with Domain of One’s Own; I had used up my disk space somehow, even though I only had two sites attached to the domain and in file manager, I could not find what was taking up all the space. So I was unable to make a new site to display my resume. After a visit to the DKC, I was allotted more space to work with, and I now have another site to use, located here. I’m still toying around with the site, but the basic bones of it are complete; I might steal an idea from a few other members of the class and display my work history as a JStimeline as well.
Misidentification
When as a group we started to upload Pvt Gordon’s diaries to our website we made a important discovery. It turns out that both diary 3987 and diary 3983 claim to take place during the same exact time. Each diary claims to end on March 18th 1864. Now there are of course a number of reasons this is impossible. Other then the obvious question why would he keep two diaries? The two diaries have conflicting content and conflicting days of the week for the apparent same date.
To try and figure this out Alex figured out that diary 3983 started on Tuesday November 10th, by using a calendar application he was able to confirm that November fell on a Tuesday in 1863 so diary 3983 was in fact the diary for November 10th- March 18th. I started to do some looking into diary 3987 which claimed to go from July 10th 1863- March 18th 1864. What I found was that July 10th did not fall on a Wednesday as the diary claimed. In 1863 July 10th actually fell on a Friday, however in 1861 July 10th did fall on a Wednesday .
Originally we as a group was convinced that diary 3987 was the correct diary for 1863, this was because the diary actually had an old label on the back that said the diary went from July 10th 1863- March 18th 1864.
Another reason we were very convinced was that the first page of the diary also had 1863 written on it. We first figured that it was Gordon who included the year because the numbers looked very similar to his numbers. However under closer inspection the numbers for the year are slightly different then his.
When we realized that these two diaries were so mislabeled I realized we needed to check the other diaries just in case those also got wrong dates attributed to them. (I am currently in the process of checking those now.) I am still unsure why this label was ever attached to the diary when the year is clearly incorrect or why someone wrote into the diary. However this process has reminded me of the danger when you assume that sources you receive all have the correct data. Thankfully we caught this, however mislabeling and incorrectly categorized dates are a big issue in researching especially when you assume that all the information is correct.
Google and HCC Group Project Update
This week, one of our class readings talked about the idea that Google “making us stupid”. The author proposed that the Internet is reshaping our thought process, making us unable to concentrate and think like we used to. He also suggested that the way we read is changing. “Efficiency and immediacy” are becoming priorities over deep reading and engaging. Kubrick’s prophecy states, “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”. I found this interesting, and can see where he is coming from, yet I found it to be more extreme than the reality. My perception is that the Internet is changing the way we read, but the changes are not only negative. We may be less focused, especially when reading longer texts, but information is much more available today than it used to be.
At this point in my group’s HCC project, we have completed all of our interviews. Now, what we need to focus on is finishing the timeline and finalizing the website. We are up to date on our contract.
Weekly Update 3/24
It’s been a while since I looked at the front end of the site; after having a new theme installed and messing around with the layout, the new site looks very good. There are a lot of placeholders right now and I want to change the look of at least one menu but it looks very good. On my end, I have just finished uploading all of my letters and pdfs in the collection but I may need to go through them again and look for spelling errors. I also need to add tifs to pretty much all of the items and that may take a while depending on the internet speed I currently have (which is not good). Other than that, there is not much going on. The team is working on a StoryMap and the letters to be recorded for Slaughter have been chosen. At this point, the webiste is mainly tying up loose ends and various miscellaneous tasks.
